What X Needs to Become a Great Super App

The first group of X users that we focused on is entrepreneurs and startup owners. They often form communities, discuss typical problems, and help each other. One of their jobs-to-be-done is to find business partners and investors.

X could help them do this job. Imagine a business owner starting a new company that needs an investor or partner. It’s crucial to team up with people who share similar views and interests. That’s how it can assist the business owner—based on the user data, subscriptions, likes, shares, and comments, X can recommend a person who might help the user.

Brands that are using social media to engage audiences are another large group that can leverage additional X services and is ready to pay for them. Usually, the user on behalf of the brand is a person from the brand’s marketing team. Their job-to-be-done would be to bring attention to their brand and create a certain brand image. For this goal, they need to be creative in their content.

X can help with this. Given that the company already supports creators, many talented creators monetize their posts, photos, and videos. To find those people who are best in their skills—e.g. artists, photographers, sound designers—X users could benefit from a creators marketplace.

Public figures are using X as one of the ways to influence people and get their ideas across. To make that happen, they need to know what their audience thinks on a particular topic or news. To help opinion leaders analyze audience views more quickly, those views can be summarised by AI.

Let’s say an activist publishes a post on a new campaign. Hundreds of people comment on that post, and to understand what sentiment prevails, they need to read all of the comments, which takes time. If an AI summariser is enabled for this account, the activist can get another post with a summary of the most popular opinions from the comments.

Individual users visit X for real-time updates relevant to their location. So, their job-to-be-done would be to be aware of local news, events, and places. If it’s a big city, the main location would be their own neighborhood.

X could offer a service in the form of a map of local interesting things. The map would work as a hub for nearby events, with geotagged posts and news by territory. If an event or a place is mentioned in a post, users can go directly from the post to the booking engine and buy a ticket or book a table in a restaurant.

Knowledge experts like copywriters, lawyers, marketing specialists, and consultants come to X to show their skills and share their expert opinions. If they’re already showing their expertise, it makes sense to help them find clients who could leverage it and pay for their service.

X can offer a platform for such experts. First, it would accumulate reviews posted by clients of these professionals and show them in their profiles. Second, it can feature a catalog of professionals filtered by area of expertise, experience, number of projects, etc. Third, professionals could connect with their clients directly via X.

The new services could be added to the existing X’s paid services, but the problem would be to encourage user adoption. This can be achieved through two methods: a unified payment system and a rewards program.

In-app payments. Using X’s own payment system for all services would simplify operations. Users would have an X wallet to pay for all X services from one place without commissions or going to third parties.

Rewards program. Gamification can encourage the adoption of new features. For example, a business owner who pays a fee for access to a partner search will get 10 points (1 point=$0.25) that can be then spent on their X Premium subscription. Or, X could give a user 10 points for subscribing to a musician, and the points could be spent on buying a ticket via X to a concert by that musician.

Business owners, brands, public figures, experts, and individual users are key segments in X's audience. Defining the segments and understanding what could appeal to them is better than trying to reach any random user on X.

Defining the segments would be one of the steps in building an X digital ecosystem. The full journey is reflected in the methodology developed by our team at HeyInnovations:

1. Identify the core competencies of a business
2. Center the ecosystem around the highest frequency service
3. Plan out the user flow: from basic actions to more complex tasks
4. Match business resources with customer needs
5. Create services within the existing business resources, starting with the highest frequency ones
6. Unify the services through a common loyalty program and user profile
7. Merge the online and offline customer experience
8. Redirect the traffic from the core service to the subsidiaries using favorable offers
9. Diversify the main business with additional services while retaining a competitive advantage
10. Converge all business processes into one digital environment

If you’d like to know more about this approach, download our free guide to ecosystem development, illustrated with our case studies and best practices from Amazon, Uber, and Klarna.